Somewhere among the trials of innocence, lessons of winning and losing.

And then: that young mind, that open heart, has almost no distance to travel, from saying "I won" to "I'm right", and… ah! Then my dear hearts, dear children, you have lost your sight, your liberty of movement, and each step forward will be a step to be retraced.

I have taken a few lessons from another text. I traveled, I went as far as I was able, to Asia — such gratitude to an early lover, who was my guide to losing self, how could I have done it alone? — and stayed until I could not recognize my thoughts. They came and queued up at night, they spilled onto page after page of notebooks, they tripped out into the night over a bowl of gudeg and a cup of sugary tea, they danced back and forth from my west to their east, a blurry trance of who? who? who am I? I seeded doubt like a farmer seeds rye, deliberately, to defeat the ragged weeds. I embraced doubt, with love, like a man embraces his partner, or a woman embraces her mate. Ah, into that beautiful blindness.

I met a woman who looked strong in her mid-life, yet felt weak as a straw in wind. I met a woman as frail as age and ill-health could make her, battering her legs til she shook, beating her kidneys til she urinated blood, erasing her husband in a War, erasing her wealth in peace… and she was strong as the temples that stood in the ring of fire for 3000 years. I lost words. I found others that explained things better. I watched for myself in others' eyes, and sometimes… when the weather was clear… I saw both the other and myself.

I think what we lose, when we begin to believe in winners, is the ability to listen to our enemies. We lose the ability to trust there is truth, in so many shards and facets, in such ways… in ways that appear explosive, in words that sound destructive, recriminating… because we humans, you know, are not so skillful in finding coal and seeing diamond. It is only heat and time make the difference: coal is diamond. You are me. Life is death, yes, yes let's make colors out of whites and blacks, my eyes are sharper than night, and so are yours..

So the pages of the texts so difficult to decipher were those from minds seemingly so foreign from my own, that even to hear their thoughts leave the tongue was occasion for pain, such deep hurt, and the expected response of anger, or of retreat. Enemy.

I remember a time when I had thrown myself far out of my element — ha ha!, and not the first time, nor the last, this desiring soul would step into jungle or desert or war zone to find that herb or spice or fragment of history that would help complete it! — I had taken myself to a farm on the sprawling prairie of southwestern Minnesota to open the land, and seed it like a lover. I found the life of a farmer somewhat less romantic than that "lover" image. I also found that the landowner felt threatened by us in many ways. His behavior grew more erratic as the pressures of the season and toil began to deconstruct my Self. So many crazy words! He used fear and his palette and made demons that all wore my face. "You are dangerous! Dangerous!" He shakes with fury, with fear, he stabs his finger at me like the barrel of a gun, he is driving slowly at the end of the quarter-mile driveway, watching us, making us watch him, pacing like a trapped creature, trapped, somehow, on an endless, horizonless landscape!

Because I found the Mystery when I went to Indonesia, because in some way I left myself behind, I listened through the fog in my lessor's mind, and hear… a foghorn, why not? I heard the lesson that he held — that insane son of a bitch — the lesson he carried in his being, for me!

Tonight I received a similar lesson, from one whom I believed I would never accept a word again. Sometimes, those who challenge us most ferociously are in such close proximity. And because they share a space and time with you, with your body, with the currents of your mind… they know you, even if they call you "enemy", maybe because they do; even through their angers and their struggles, the mirror of the world is there, they are it, as scratched and muddied and fogged as that glass might seem: right there in front of you. Condemnation is the inability to use stillness and wisdom to dissect that stormwash of thoughts: condemnation is lack of sight and no great finesse, the ability to see diamond in a seam of coal.

So the lesson of my lesson — no, I will not share it with you, though I am so grateful(!), to have been given a grain of truth about myself! Like one of those missing puzzle pieces you have been searching for all over, you want to finish this darned picture! and there that person is, standing beside you, hand open, with one more piece offered in an open palm…! — the lesson of my lesson, the fact that I learned from an unexpected and personally untrustworthy source: that lack of trust closes your ears. The Teaching and the conduit for that Teaching, our teachers, they are all around us, and not always, probably not often, maybe rarely in a form we can recognize from within our fixed ideas. So I say (to myself, and why not you?): never stop listening. You can measure, but be most careful of your science when you see your mind begin to take sides. It will always side with what you already know.

Undecide there is a winner: there will be no winner, ever. It is true that in some voices, your skill may not be such (not yet?) to extract the information that you need. Leave it: you know how many voices are around you. All reciting lessons for you, an incessant mantra, a prayer, a brothers' chant. No need to waste your time, and don't waste others' time, if your ears aren't open to receive.

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And words, these words? Attempts to hold a few flashes of understanding, fireflies in tonight's jar. Whether we live better for our words, or worse, will be decided later, when those we did our best to love help us from this life.